Aoi’s birthday has passed and the request to complete Hikaru’s promise is finished. So why is he still here? Apparently Hikaru, being the prince playboy that he is, had made promises to a bunch of other girls and it’s up to Koremitsu to track them down and complete them.

Welcome to Volume 2 of When Hikaru was on the Earth.

In this volume, Koremitsu finds Yū, Hikaru’s second girl. However she doesn’t remember the promise Hikaru made to her. After multiple encounters with her, Koremitsu tries to take her outside from some fresh air, but she refuses to move despite her rough living conditions. However Koremitsu soon realizes that there are signs that something far deeper is preventing her from leaving.

The story starts with the implication that instead of Hikaru dying in an accident, Hikaru was actually killed by someone. We don’t get the answer to that mystery in this volume but the action of trying to find the murderer pushes us to the next heroine in the story, Yū.

Yū is shy and timid student who is socially withdrawn from the world. She’s quite different from our last heroine, Aoi, and especially in relation to Hikaru. Instead of a girlfriend, Hikaru never actually viewed her as one. Mizuki draws the idea that these two characters are actually very similar, which leads into one of main themes of this volume. The book concentrates on the idea of leaving safe confines, coming out of a restricted environment thought to be protection. This theme is applied from an inner conflict and an outer conflict. Koremitsu and a certain other character wants to bring Yū back into the world, while Yū deals with how to overcome her current predicament. These two conflicts weave into each other in order to accomplish a complete understanding of facing forward towards a brighter world.

“Yū was like a white flower too, but was a flower that could be dyed by other colors without warning. It seemed that if anyone were to touch her, they would damage her and soil her petals.”

Taken from Hellping.

Our second theme arises when our returning character, Honoka, returns back. There’s a small sub-plot about her relationship with Koremitsu and we get to slowly see her feelings about her. Koremitsu and Yū also encounters this predicament of truly loving someone. Back in the first volume, we get to see denial of love get resolved but in this case, we get to see how love begins and how our characters undergo this “unfamiliar” feelings.

It also is the leading point into our next volume…but I won’t say anything.

As for the artwork, drawn by the same person who did the first one, the illustrations are colored with an ocean theme, reflective upon the ocean underwater motifs with colors of light blue, green and white. The designs are again similar to the first volume but the facial profile are more cleaner and beautiful.

Amazing.

Yugao’s themes ranges from beginning feelings of loving someone, the idea of happiness, and facing the world yet again. When Hikaru was on the Earth continues that heartfelt message as our characters start to slowly change.